What caused the “Black Death?”
Stuart doctors said that dogs and cats, pigs, pet rabbits and pigeons could spread the plague. The government believed them and tried to prevent the plague by killing all the dogs in the town. Dogs were banned from towns and dog-killers were appointed to round up strays. Other doctors blamed dirty air-huge bonfires were lit in the hope that they would purify it. No one understood that the real enemy was the rats, …show more content…
In 1347, armed forces attacking a little town called Caffa in the Crimea, hurled plagued bodies into the city. The Italian traders then brought the Black Death to Sicily in October 1347. In June 1348 the plague reached Dorset. By the end of the year it had infected the rest of the south of England. So it managed to travel about 5,071 miles. In 1349, the epidemic spread into Wales, Ireland and the north of England. The Scottish people believed that God was punishing the English so they attacked the north of England and the Scottish army caught the outbreak, so consequently in 1350, the plague spread across Scotland. The first plague died out in 1350. The plague came back again between 1361 and 1364, and five more times prior to 1405. These plagues mostly killed children, who had weak resistance to the …show more content…
Something had to be done. By now scientists understood that germs cause disease and thanks to Koch they knew how to perform tests to discover which germs caused a particular disease. Or so they reckoned, in 1894 a team of scientists from Robert Koch’s Institute went to Hong-Kong to find the plague germ. They were led by renowned scientist Shibasburo Kitasto. But there was another scientist in the field, Swiss born Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) who had worked for Louis Pasteur and had since been travelling and making maps in Vietnam. Yersin had found the germ that causes plague and that’s how it came to be named Yersinia pestis, in his honour. Back in France he was able to make an antitoxin to the germ’s toxins and two years later he was back in Hong-Kong to try it out. For the first time in History people were actually cured of the plague. Today, although the plague is still around, wild animals in Asia and parts of United States carry the disease- it can be beaten by drugs and anti-biotics. The plague is still feared but it’s no longer a mass